Washington
Diana DeGette had formidable shoes to fill when she won the Denver congressional seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Patricia Schroeder in 1996.
Schroeder was renowned for her wit, pluck and legislative achievements on defense and women’s issues. In 1987, she was a legitimate contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
DeGette, not as sparkling or telegenic as her charismatic predecessor, seemed fated to linger in Schroeder’s shadow.
Yet Congress was different in Schroeder’s day. Most notably, it was Democratic.
Schroeder and the rest of the young liberals who got elected in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate were members of a historic majority. They could chair hearings, get on TV, investigate the executive branch, and have their bills heard and voted on. They spent more time squabbling with their own party elders than fending off the negligible group of Republicans.
DeGette has not known such times. She has always served in the powerless minority in Congress. In her first few terms she hit a kind of reverse trifecta when it came to political clout: a newcomer, Democrat and woman.
“A new congressman always feels so unalterably lonely and useless,” the great House speaker, Sam Rayburn, said.
And the numbers may be better than they were 30 years ago, but don’t kid yourself: Capitol Hill is still very much “the planet of the guys,” as Schroeder used to call it.
All of which makes DeGette’s accomplishment last week, pushing her bill to fund embryonic stem-cell research onto President Bush’s desk, the more remarkable. As a minority congresswoman, she squared off against a president whose party controlled the Congress, and more than held her own.
DeGette has not won; not yet. After shepherding the legislation through the Republican House and Senate, DeGette watched miserably as Bush vetoed it. Then she and her allies came up short at corralling the two-thirds majority needed in both houses of Congress to override the veto.
Bush’s veto bruised the hopes of paraplegics, patients with neurological disorders, the parents of diabetic kids and the families of those afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease and other illnesses.
They must wait longer before their government puts its full might and money behind the scientific crusade to unlock the stem cell’s secrets. For many sufferers, who lack the luxury of time, the events of last week were bitter indeed.
Yet it was hard to watch things unfold on Capitol Hill and not feel a tide shifting. It may take another Congress, and perhaps another president, but it is difficult to argue with DeGette when she says that full stem-cell funding “will become law. … It’s just a question of whether it will be sooner than later.”
In all American history, not 5 percent of presidential vetoes have been overridden. It’s an especially tough trick to buck a president whose party controls the Congress. You need go back to 1930, and Herbert Hoover, to find the last Republican president who had a veto overridden by a Republican Congress.
So no one faulted DeGette when Congress sustained Bush’s first-ever veto, on an issue dear to the Republican Party’s socially conservative base. She was recognized instead as an indefatigable wonder-worker for getting the bill that far.
It was a long, hard slog. DeGette was an anonymous third-term congresswoman in the spring of 2001, when she quietly collected more than 200 signatures from members of the House on a letter asking Bush to permit full federal funding for stem-cell research. Like many of her colleagues, she had a personal angle: her daughter has diabetes.
Bush sought instead to compromise on the issue, allowing federal funding for existing lines of embryonic stem cells, but not for any new lines created, as scientists proposed, from the 400,000 unused embryos stored in U.S. fertility clinics.
DeGette met with diabetes groups and other national patient’s organizations that believe the few number of existing stem-cell lines are not enough. She won the invaluable help of a Republican sponsor by forming an alliance with Rep. Michael Castle of Delaware
Castle and DeGette and their staffs worked diligently to enlist the support of members of both caucuses. Their big break came last year when House Speaker Dennis Hastert, fearful they were accumulating enough votes to compel him to bring the bill to the floor, cut a face-saving deal. Castle’s moderates agreed to support a stalled budget bill, and Hastert scheduled a vote on stem cells.
The bill swept through the House with the help of Nancy Reagan, who lobbied Republicans after witnessing her husband’s decline and death from Alzheimer’s disease. And then, Tuesday, the Castle-DeGette bill passed the Senate with 63 votes.
DeGette engaged in no political trickery. She was just there: prodding, asking and nudging, and offering her colleagues a moderately crafted, bipartisan answer to the heart- rending pleas of their dying or paralyzed constituents.
Lawmaker after lawmaker surrendered to the question: Unless we are ready to ban fertility clinics, and compel the adoption of 400,000 existing embryos, how can we tell suffering fellow humans those embryos are better off incinerated, or deteriorating in a freezer, than employed in medical research?
At week’s end, DeGette and her allies had an issue to take to the voters this November and, if need be, in the fall of 2008.
DeGette has quietly moved into the ranks of the House Democratic leadership, and her party is grateful for her work.
Most of those voting to sustain Bush’s veto were Republicans. If enough of them lose in November, DeGette might find herself in the majority, casting an even bigger shadow of her own.
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Read and comment on his columns at The Denver Post’s Washington Web log (denverpostbloghouse.com/ washington).
